Long Islanders looking for fertility treatment have a new, inclusive option.
Spring Fertility, a fertility clinic that emphasizes personalized care, opened in Garden City on Sept. 22. This is the clinic’s eighth location across the country and first on Long Island.
“Our founders had practiced in other settings where patients had complained about feeling like a number. They wanted to create a more patient-centric approach to care,” said Dr. Chantae Sullivan-Pyke, who will be one of the primary physicians at the Garden City location.
Sullivan-Pyke said the doctors themselves carry out many of the procedures that other practices may have stenographers or other personnel do to ensure that patients are always seeing the same providers. This allows for a genuine relationship to be built and helps people feel secure and comfortable at appointments, Sullivan-Pyke said.
“We’re constantly having that high touch experience, which I think patients appreciate,” she said. “In addition to that, we have specific protocols that we use and tailor to each patient to optimize their outcomes.”
The clinic offers IVF, or in vitro fertilization, egg and embryo freezing, donor and surrogacy planning and facilitation and LGTBG family planning, all at a highly individualized level, Sullivan-Pyke said.
For those struggling with fertility or same sex couples looking for egg or sperm donors, Sullivan-Pyke said Spring offers step-by-step guidance and facilitation through the process of finding donors or surrogates.
She said Spring helps connect patients to approved, vetted sperm and egg banks and surrogacy agencies, providing them with the opportunity to review all the available options, find and meet with a surrogate, or arrange for a pre-determined surrogate or donor to work with them.
The practice also offers in-house legal, psychological and genetic counselling throughout the entire family-planning process.
“The whole way through, they have support from the medical perspective as well as a mental health perspective for both donor and surrogacy procedures,” Sullivan-Pyke said. “We work with agencies, but there are sometimes people who are known to the patient with whom they are going to be working. So, we help them to go through what steps need to be taken in terms of blood tests, approvals, psychology consultations, medical consultations, whatever needs to be done before.”
“The patients have a team who’s working with them the whole time,” she continued. “Any questions that they have, any bumps that occur along the way, there is someone who’s available to help.”
Spring also focuses on making fertility care, which is frequently cost-prohibitively expensive, more accessible, she said. For people who have tried IVF or other fertility treatments before and haven’t found success, Spring offers a free failed cycle review process, where a fertility expert will review the patients’ charts and procedures so far and provide advice on how to proceed.
“We’ve seen patients who have struggled in other places and had success in our hands. Obviously, we can’t guarantee that every single person will have success, but sometimes, if things aren’t working out in one place, it’s worth trying a different one,” Sullivan-Pyke said. “This process can be quite expensive. To give patients that opportunity to just have a fertility expert review their cycles and give them their thoughts on what the next step should be, without having to pay for it after they’ve already gone through an expensive and emotional process, lowers the barriers to care and offers them an option.”
“Whether they choose to stay with us or stay with their prior clinic, at least they have an opportunity to have that conversation with someone else,” she continued.”
The practice also offers a money-back guarantee on egg freezing, promising patients that if they freeze their eggs with Spring and aren’t able to have a child with them once they take them out, they will be refunded the cost.
Sullivan-Pyke and Spring’s co-founder, Dr. Peter Klatsky, said expanding the practice into Long Island after working out of a Manhattan-based practice for four years and California-based practices for 10 years made sense.
“With the opening of our Long Island clinic, we’re making the world-class, personalized care of Spring Fertility more accessible to patients outside of Manhattan,” Klatsky said. “Over the past few years, we’ve seen our patients start their families away from city centers and we’re making that easier and more convenient for them.”
Sullivan-Pyke said patients would have the option to book appointments at both the Garden City and Manhattan locations as they received their care.
She said she encouraged patients who are considering exploring fertility treatment to reach out.
“People should feel empowered to reach out and schedule a consultation because information is power,” Sullivan-Pyke said. “A lot of private insurers do cover IVF and egg freezing. You should reach out to make an appointment if that’s something that you’re thinking about.”
Spring Fertility’s Garden City location is at 700 Stewart Ave. and open from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday through Friday.
